The Jakru craft, sleek and fast, wasted no time in blasting off, its blue fire churning the dust to clouds of frenzy. Immediately a barrage of Skullrox gunfire raked the outer hull as they strove to escape the perimeter. Coordinated shots shook the Vilodome, knocking men off their feet. But the shields held.
Zaul was about to retaliate but Lexia stayed his hand. “No, Zaul, you’ve already battered them enough. They were largely innocent. Just get us out of here!”
Five large Gaxion battlenoughts rose up on the viewscreen. Miko blinked in dismay, awaiting instant doom.
“Engage early light jump,” Zaul roared. The pilots on the bridge entered the coordinates.
The sequence, dangerous as it was in such close proximity to a planet of significant gravity, was the only option.
In a searing blaze, the craft shuddered. The crew, vidscreens and blinking command panels shifted and stretched in four directions. Miko thought they would be ripped to oblivion by the conflicting forces at play. The planet shimmered below, and the stars sheared every which way. Then they were in space, at one with the atoms of creation, moving with the speed of the gods.
A chorus of laughter and applause burst from the crew gathered at the bridge.
In the belvedere of the craft the Empress shook her head. “Zaul, you always were a hothead.”
“But if I hadn’t gone out of my way to storm the—”
“I know, she waved him off, “if you had not interfered, I would still be playmate to that monster—and these rebels, for all their daring and mettle, would be dead, sizzled to cinders by now.”
She stared critically at the motley crew of burnt, cut and broken figures who stood before her. “Now, for those answers... Who starts?”
X
Audra peered up at the fleeing craft carrying the Jakru avengers, as its blue flare jetted it into the atmosphere. She turned from her hidden place at the portal overlooking the desert with some misgiving. She had failed again to reunite with Miko. Blood dripped from her stump of a tentacle, leaving a sizzling trail. Without one of her long grasping tentacles, she would be vulnerable.
With an angry chitter she moved awkwardly across the ledge, hugging the cliff face, twitching in wrath. Let them flee, she chirped to herself. There was nowhere for them to hide...
A new sight made her polyped mouth sag: a glint of metal amidst the boulders around the corner. Squinting in the glare, she halted, quivering at a streamlined ship that hovered there with authority. Its landing gear was lowered. The whine of subtronic engines racked the stillness. Had they detected her hidden craft?
A human male, skulking about with his stunner raised, stood guard outside her craft. A flicker of movement. Had another figure just forced the seal and slipped inside?
Audra glided forth, whipped out a stinging tentacle and broke the man’s neck in an instant. She dragged the dead man inside the darkened vessel, sealing the door behind. She crossed the landing bay in great leaps and caught the other soldier in midword speaking into a com set. He turned, gazed in stark horror, but Audra rushed in and seized him in a slimy embrace, wrapping a nest of tentacles about his neck, waist and thigh, squeezing the breath out of him. The stunner fell from his fingers. The man began to scream as her body essences gave off an acidic fluid.
Like a wild animal, he kicked, clawed at her, ripping patches off her ropy flesh. Audra was sluggish from loss of blood. They fell to the ground in a rolling mass of tentacles and slime, and black blood that slicked the floor. She let her slimy appendages coil tighter, his bones near cracking. His body bent, went limp and a gurgle of raw anguish escaped his throat.
She stopped the chemical process. Death was not for this one.
She stared at the weapon. Cowardly to use such a prop.
She pulled the gasping man across the floor and toward the locust tanks that loomed like aquaria out of a nightmare. Dropping him there, she extended a tentacle and fumbled with the stopper on the first tank as the groaning trooper tried to crawl away across the floor plates, gagging from time to time at the toxic slime enveloping him. She lifted him effortlessly and plunged him into the gaping hole. He splashed and flailed, managing to hook a finger in one of Audra’s eyes and rip a handful of fibrous flesh out of her shoulder with the other, but she plunged him under the foul water onto the head of the squealing locust underneath trying desperately to escape.
Human and locust groped and kicked, the human butting his lacerated brow against the glass, yelling, bubbles forming from his lips. But then he choked, convulsed, as the green liquid overwhelmed him, filling his lungs. He floated, limbs flailing like the flippers of a great, sinking turtle. The man’s eyes bulged, his copper hair suspended like wet noodles. He choked again, his tongue lolling as he tried to claw at the locust.
Audra plugged the open hatch with the stopper, the connected intravenous cable that fed external locusts swinging to tap against the glass, and moved on to the adjacent tank. They would be coming for them soon.
A boom thudded against the hull. Bracers? Audra turned. Garbled voices came over the trooper’s com lying in a pool of blood. The L-Doraxu locust vessel shuddered; it jerked backward toward the Skullrox ship. Audra peered through the porthole. The whine of the dreadnought’s engines escalated. Another craft had appeared, an air cargo tanker. The ship loomed with retracted ramp like a hungry shark. A massive cable had latched on to it, eel-like. Men with stunners dropped from the first ship and advanced upon
